Dear Commons Community,

Jeffrey Mervis, policy analyst for Science, has an article this morning on how the Trump administration is trying to radically change the National Science Foundation (NSF). Here is an excerpt.  

“Smaller. Cheaper. More constrained. That appears to be the vision for the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is emerging from an unprecedented series of changes by President Donald Trump’s administration, including moves last week to restructure the organization and transform how it awards grants.

The changes would result in a shrunken NSF that focuses on a handful of fields seen as economic drivers rather than supporting basic research across all disciplines. Its process of choosing what to fund would no longer rely heavily on scientists on leave from their universities, bringing with them fresh ideas on how to invest in cutting-edge science. And NSF would care less about finding the “missing millions,” NSF’s phrase for increasing the diversity of the country’s scientific workforce. 

Trump is a long way from achieving that vision for the country’s second largest funder of science. But last week’s restructuring comes on top of previous steps that have halted new awards, terminated existing grants, and reduced the agency’s 1700-person staff. The administration has also called for slashing NSF’s overhead payments to universities, and shrinking its $9 billion budget by more than half.

NSF officials have been largely silent about the larger significance of the changes. And its presidentially appointed oversight body, the National Science Board, so far has not commented on any of them, although one member, Alondra Nelson, resigned this week. And though individual scientists have expressed alarm about the turmoil at the agency, the sharpest public criticism to date has come from a handful of Democrats in Congress, who think the changes are misguided and will harm NSF and the U.S. research enterprise.

“Mere months ago, each of these individual decisions would have been an unprecedented shock,” a dozen members of the science committee in the House of Representatives that oversees NSF wrote in an 8 May letter to Brian Stone. He has been NSF’s acting director since the abrupt resignation last month of Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, a Trump appointee. “President Trump has made this chaos and destruction commonplace. However, we refuse to accept this as our new reality.”

A 9 May memo obtained by Science from NSF’s chief management officer, Micah Cheatham, describes some of the changes. Science has learned about others from sources inside and outside the agency who requested anonymity because they feared reprisal.

One major change would abolish NSF’s current 37 divisions, spread across eight directorates, which distribute funding to researchers in a wide range of fields, from the social sciences to physics. Those divisions would be replaced by clusters that would focus on five areas: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science.

Last week, NSF preemptively eliminated one of those divisions within the education directorate, on equity for excellence in science, technology, engineering, and math, and fired its entire staff, believed to number between 15 and 20. However, on 12 May NSF rescinded both moves after a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from laying off workers at several agencies in a suit brought by a labor union representing federal employees.

“The focus on a few areas is gravely concerning,” says Suzanne Ortega, who leads the Council of Graduate Schools. “The basic, curiosity-driven science that has paid off so handsomely for the country over the decades doesn’t necessarily start in one of those fields. And the idea that the insights of social scientists aren’t important in understanding today’s world and our political adversaries is just ridiculous.”

A second change dramatically reduces NSF’s roster of employees on loan from universities for stints of 1 to 4 years. The number of such positions, called rotators, would drop by 81%, from 368 to 70. The surviving positions would be distributed across the five priority areas and filled by existing rotators “to the maximum extent possible,” Cheatham said in his memo.

A third major disruption to the status quo is the termination of existing grants. In the past month, NSF has pulled the plug on more than 1400 awards, amounting to a loss of more than $1 billion in promised funding.

The education directorate has been hit hardest. The terminations include grants from several programs mandated by Congress, notably the 34-year-old Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation and the Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Initiative to broaden participation in science and engineering, which began in 2011. The Trump administration apparently saw both programs as violating a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that bans funding for any research that favors one demographic group or excludes participation by some groups.

The grant terminations have disproportionately affected principal investigators (PIs) from groups traditionally underrepresented in science—notably women, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities—according to data collected by NSF. Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant.

All the recent moves are consistent with Trump’s request to Congress this month to shrink the agency’s budget by 55%, to $4 billion, for the 2026 fiscal year that starts on 1 October. So is NSF’s plan to reduce by 60% the number of administrators classified as senior executive service (SES) employees, who earn salaries much higher than the regular federal pay scale. NSF’s current roster of 143 SES positions will plunge to 59, according to Cheatham’s memo, a number it says is commensurate with NSF’s “new organizational structure and proposed future budgets.”

NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions also appears to be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that would add a new layer of review. Currently, for all but the biggest grants, the final step in the award process is for a division director to concur with a recommendation made by a program officer, based in part on input from review panels. (The NSF system differs from the one used by the National Institutes of Health, where advisory councils for each institute have the final say and proposals are typically funded based on scores assigned by a review panel.)

Last week, NSF staff were briefed on the new process for vetting proposals. Those that are highly recommended, but modestly out of step with the DEI directive, could gain final approval after tweaks, according to a slide presentation obtained by Science. But proposals seen as having more serious flaws would be declined without additional comment. And even proposals that get a green light from a division director would be screened by a new body, whose membership has not been determined.

Science advocates fear the additional review could be a mechanism to force NSF to fund only research that suits the ideological bent of the Trump administration. And Democrats on the House science committee suspect NSF is already feeling that pressure. “So, who is in charge here?” they wrote to Stone. “How much is [the White House budget office] dictating decisions based on hard-right political ideology and not scientific or research expertise?” And in a reference to billionaire Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency, the legislators ask pointedly: “How far does DOGE’s influence reach?”

The legislators could soon get a chance to ask those questions in person if, as has long been the tradition, House and Senate panels summon NSF officials to testify on the administration’s budget request.”

This is a sad state of affairs for science research in our country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia applied a personalized treatment to cure a baby’s genetic disorder, the first time such a procedure has ever been used. , It opens the door to similar therapies for others. Here is an excerpt that appeared in The New York Times. (Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment)

“Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.

The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?

They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.

“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.

Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.

The investigators who led the effort to save KJ are presenting their work on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy, and are also publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. More than 30 million people in the United States have one of more than 7,000 rare genetic diseases. Most are so rare that no company is willing to spend years developing a gene therapy that so few people would need.

But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research — offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.

Illnesses like KJ’s are the result of a single mutation — an incorrect DNA letter among the three billion in the human genome. Correcting it requires pinpoint targeting in an approach called base editing.

To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

While KJ’s treatment was customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA. Only the CRISPR instructions leading the editor to the spot on the DNA with the mutation would need to be changed. Treatments would be cheaper, “by an order of magnitude at least,” Dr. Marks said.

The method, said Dr. Marks, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research paper, “is, to me, one of the most potentially transformational technologies out there.”

This sounds like an incredible breakthrough.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Below is a review of a new book entitled Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, that depicts Joe Biden as out of touch and whose family and aides enabled his campaign for a second term as president.  According to the review, the book is “a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

It is a sad indictment not just of Biden and his enablers but of the entire Democratic Party leadership for failing to recognize and do something to protect the country.

The book will be available for purchase next week.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

The New York Times

A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle

By Jennifer Szalai

Published May 13, 2025Updated May 14, 2025

ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

In Christian theology, original sin begins with Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” chronicles a different fall from grace. The cover image is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. The biblical story is about the danger of innocent curiosity; the story in this new book is about the danger of willful ignorance.

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” Tapper and Thompson write. On the evening of June 27, 2024, Democratic voters watched the first presidential debate in amazement and horror: A red-faced Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers while Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.

Trump’s debate performance was of a piece with his rallies, a jumble of nonsensical digressions and wild claims. But for many Americans, the extent of Biden’s frailty came as a shock. Most of the president’s appearances had, by then, become tightly controlled affairs. For at least a year and a half, Biden’s aides had been scrambling to accommodate an octogenarian president who was becoming increasingly exhausted and confused. According to “Original Sin,” which makes pointed use of the word “cover-up” in the subtitle, alarmed donors and pols who sought the lowdown on Biden’s cognitive state were kept in the dark. Others had daily evidence of Biden’s decline but didn’t want to believe it.

Tapper is an anchor for CNN (and also served as a moderator for the presidential debate); Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios. In an authors’ note, they explain that they interviewed approximately 200 people, including high-level insiders, “some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages.”

The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion. Some Democrats, especially those who didn’t see the president that often, relied on his surrogates for reassurance about his condition (“He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine”); others were wary of giving ammunition to the Trump campaign, warning that he was an existential threat to the country. Tapper and Thompson are scornful of such rationales: “For those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.”

Biden announced that he would be running for re-election in April 2023; he had turned 80 the previous November and was already the oldest president in history. Over his long life, he had been through a lot: the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972; two aneurysm surgeries in 1988; the death of his son Beau in 2015; the seemingly endless trouble kicked up by his son Hunter, a recovering addict whose legal troubles included being under investigation by the Justice Department.

Yet Biden always bounced back. The fact that he defied the naysayers and beat the odds to win the 2020 election was, for him and his close circle of family and advisers, a sign that he was special — and persistently underestimated. They maintained “a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again,” the authors write. “And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.”

In 2019, when Biden announced a presidential run, he was 76. It was still a time when “Good Biden was far more present than Old Biden.” By 2023, the authors suggest, that ratio had reversed. Some of his decline was hard to distinguish from what they call “the Bidenness,” which included his longtime reputation for gaffes, meandering stories and a habit of forgetting staffers’ names.

But people who didn’t see Biden on a daily basis were increasingly taken aback when they finally laid eyes on him. They would remark on how his once booming voice had become a whisper, how his confident stride had become a shuffle. An aghast congressman recalls being reminded of his father, who had Alzheimer’s; another thought of his father, too, who died of Parkinson’s.

The people closest to Biden landed on some techniques to handle (or disguise) what was happening: restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; instructing his writers to keep his speeches brief so that he didn’t have to spend too much time on his feet; having him use the short stairs to Air Force One. When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.” By late 2023, his staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday.

When White House aides weren’t practicing fastidious stage management, they seemed to be sticking their heads in the sand. According to a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Biden’s aides decided against his taking a cognitive test in early 2024. Tapper and Thompson quote a physician who served as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit for the last four administrations and expressed his dismay at the idea of withholding such information: “If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose.”

Just how much of this rigmarole was desperate rationalization versus deliberate scheming is never entirely clear. Tapper and Thompson identify two main groups that closed ranks around Biden: his family and a group of close aides known internally as “the Politburo” that included his longtime strategist Mike Donilon and his counselor Steve Ricchetti. The family encouraged Biden’s view of himself as a historic figure. The Politburo was too politically hard-nosed for that. Instead, its members pointed to Biden’s record in office and the competent people around him. The napping, the whispering, the shuffling — all that stuff had merely to do with the “performative” parts of the job.

Tapper and Thompson vehemently disagree. They offer a gracious portrait of Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified materials and in his February 2024 report famously described the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden and his team were incensed and tried “to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” but the authors defend his notorious line. They emphasize that it is incumbent upon a special counsel to spell out how the subject of an investigation would probably appear to a jury — and that what Hur wrote about Biden was true.

Of course, in an election like 2024, when the differences between the candidates are so stark and the stakes are so high, nearly every scrap of information gets viewed through the lens of “Will it help my team win?” Even competently administered policy could not compensate for a woeful inability to communicate with the American people. In a democracy, this is a tragedy — especially if you believe, as Biden did, that a second Trump term would put the very existence of that democracy in peril.

Earlier this month, in what looks like an attempt to get ahead of the book’s publication, Biden went on “The View” to say that he accepts some responsibility for Trump’s victory: “I was in charge.” But he was dismissive about reports of any cognitive decline. In “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson describe him waking up the morning after the 2024 election thinking that if only he had stayed in the race, he would have won. “That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again,” the authors write. There was just one problem with his reasoning: “His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.”

Dear Commons Community,

This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow says a lot about the state of our country.  

It was sent to me by my colleague, Patsy Moskal from the University of Central Florida.

Tony 

Trump Saluting Saudi General. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Dear Commons Community,

Trump saluted each Saudi Arabian general who greeted him during his visit to Riyadh yesterday, causing critics to melt down over the spectacle.

Standing next to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump was seen saluting and shaking hands as the long line of generals waited to greet the American president.  Trump’s  actions generated a storm on social media.  Here is a sample.

Journalist and former UN diplomat Olga Nesterova pointed out, “Trump goes ahead and salutes every single Saudi official at the Royal Court in Riyadh.”

The X account @JoeyFotoFr displayed the following post: “As an American citizen, my president salutes no one in the world. If I’d accept an exception it would be a salute to the flag, covering the body of a fallen American soldier. Saluting these guys is national humiliation by the traitor Trump, a pig POTUS.”

Republicans Against Trump wrote, “Trump salutes a Saudi general. Disgusting, disgraceful. So much for ‘America First,” and asked, “Why does Trump keep saluting generals from autocratic regimes?”

@JoJoFromJerz, with nearly a million followers on X, wrote, “Hey MAGA — should I ‘cry harder’ because the sitting so-called President debased himself and our entire country for all the world to see…”

The account of Artie Vandelay, with 10,000 followers, referenced the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, who was killed in 2018 in an operation that U.S. intelligence determined was approved by the Saudi Crown Prince.

“While standing next to the guy who had a resident American journalist beheaded and dismembered for writing things he didn’t like. All seems on point,” the account posted.

Travis Matthew, with 61,000 followers wrote, “No other American President has ever saluted a foreign general. Until the draft dodger entered office.”

@sensiblemiddle echoed that sentiment, writing, “5X draft dodger Trump mocks our own soldiers calling them ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’ but honors Saudi soldiers with a full salute.

According to Newsweek, “There has been a discussion in recent years about the proper etiquette for presidents saluting the military, particularly those from other nations. A returned salute by Trump to a North Korean general during his first term sparked criticism, with some saying he should not have shown respect to a hostile nation. Others said it was courteous to return the gesture.”

It is disgraceful seeing Trump begging and groveling to the Saudis.  I was in Manhattan about one mile from the World Trade center on 9/11 and will never forget that there was little to no cooperation from the Saudi government in the investigation especially given the fact that a relative of the royal family masterminded the attack.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Major League Baseball yesterday removed Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson – two of the sport’s most famous players who were previously kicked out of baseball for gambling on the game – from the league’s permanently ineligible list.

The historic decision by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred allows Rose to be considered for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that had been ruled out as part of the settlement he reached with Major League Baseball. Rose died in September, and Manfred ruled that his lifetime ban ended with his death.

“In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game,” Manfred wrote. “Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.

“Therefore, I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual, and Mr. Rose will be removed from the permanently ineligible list.”

Jackson was a member of the Chicago White Sox who were accused of conspiring with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series on purpose. The Black Sox Scandal is among the most infamous in baseball history and Jackson, along with seven of his teammates, was banned for life from MLB by then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

The eight members of the White Sox were acquitted of conspiring with gamblers in 1921 but nonetheless were forced away from the game.

Rose, who passed away last year at the age of 83, holds the Major League Baseball record for the number of games played (3,562) and hits (4,256). ESPN was first to report the news.

After transitioning into a career as a manager, MLB revealed in the spring of 1989 that it was investigating Rose for gambling. Among the accusations was that he gambled on baseball games played by teams he either played for or managed. He later admitted to gambling on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds and said in a 2007 radio interview that he bet on every Reds game while he as manager.

In the final years of his life, Rose had attempted multiple times to get reinstated by the league and to be made eligible for induction into the Hall. He tried to get reinstated by the league in 2015 and 2020 but was denied.

I never thought Rose would be reinstated!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Charles Gasparino, a veteran Fox Business Network correspondent declared that both President Donald Trump’s administration and China “blinked” when it came to negotiations between the countries on significantly easing tariffs.

Gasparino — in one of several posts on X, formerly Twitter — stressed that he “didn’t say we won” in response to a social media user who suggested Gasparino saw the deal as a U.S. victory.

“Trump raised tariffs on the world, the markets, particularly the bond market — which we need to finance our debt — rebelled,” Gasparino wrote in a separate post.

“Trump then was forced to back off.  End of story.   

Gasparino argued last month that the Trump administration had a “weak negotiating hand” at the time with the U.S. nearing a recession and markets being “on edge.”

“We need people to buy our debt, and China supplies us with a lot of cheap goods,” Gasparino said in an appearance on Fox News’ “The Story.”

“We could see inflation ratchet up dramatically if we don’t get a deal with them. And [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] knows this.”

The deal announced Monday sees the countries agreeing to a 90-day pause on tariffs, with the U.S. bringing its 145% tariffs down to 30% on Chinese imports and China dropping its 125% tariffs down to 10% on U.S. imports.

Gasparino on Monday also wrote that the tariffs have taught a “little lesson on how markets exert their power,” adding, “how when you have to depend on them as we still do (and remember its really the budget deficit thats causing the trade deficit and we need the budget deficit to maintain our standard of living) you can’t go to trade war with the world without bad stuff happening.”

Good to see this analysis from a Trump-friendly media outlet.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Pope Leo XIV has urged for “responsibility and discernment” over the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) during his first press briefing with the media since being elected as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Leo acknowledged that A.I. has “immense potential” for the good of humanity, but echoed his predecessor, Pope Francis, as he warned it could also pose “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

Former Pope Francis had become increasingly vocal about his concerns over A.I. and its potential threat to humanity during his time as head of the church.

In April, shortly before his passing, Francis urged people to “to look less at screens and look each other in the eyes more.”

“Let us pray that the use of the new technologies will not replace human relationships, will respect the dignity of the person, and will help us face the crises of our times,” he added.

Pope Leo told his first press briefing, “Communication is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture, of human and digital environments that become spaces for dialogue and discussion. In looking at how technology is developing, this mission becomes ever more necessary. I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity. This responsibility concerns everyone in proportion to his or her age and role in society.”

Leo, who was elected as the first American to lead the Roman Catholic Church, told the gathered press on Monday that A.I. was one of the great challenges of this era.

The pope, formerly known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, said that the responsibility for using artificial intelligence safely, “concerns everyone in proportion to his or her age and role in society.”

Leo also referenced the issue in his remarks Saturday, where he said he identified with his predecessor Francis, and spoke of another industrial revolution through A.I.

“In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” he said.

“It has been clearly seen in the example of so many of my predecessors, and most recently by Pope Francis himself, with his example of complete dedication to service and to sober simplicity of life, his abandonment to God throughout his ministry and his serene trust at the moment of his return to the Father’s house. Let us take up this precious legacy and continue on the journey, inspired by the same hope that is born of faith,” Leo said.

Interesting that Pope Leo IV should make AI one of the first issues he comments on.

Tony

The government-owned Qatar Amiri Flight company’s Boeing 747-8Z5 is similar to one said to be in discussions to be transferred to Trump.

Dear Commons Community,

In what is perhaps his sleaziest move since becoming president in January,  Trump intends to accept a Boeing 747-8 plane as a gift from the Qatari royal family that would be outfitted to serve as Air Force One, according to a source briefed on the matter.  As reported by Reuters and ABC News.

The luxury plane, which would be one of the most valuable gifts ever received by the U.S. government, would eventually be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, the source said. A new commercial 747-8 costs approximately $400 million.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social late on Sunday, Trump appeared to confirm the proposal.

“So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane,” he wrote.

Democrats and good government advocates said it was unethical and likely unconstitutional for Qatar to make such a gift.

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “Any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s administration is committed to full transparency.”

A Qatari spokesperson, Ali Al-Ansari, told the New York Times that the possible transfer of the aircraft was still under consideration and “no decision has been made,” the newspaper reported.

ABC News was first to report the planned gift yesterday.

Trump has expressed frustration at the delays in delivering two new 747-8 aircraft to serve as an updated Air Force One. During his first term, Trump had reached a deal with Boeing to deliver the jets in 2024. A U.S. Air Force official told Congress last week that Boeing had proposed finishing the planes by 2027.

Trump toured the Qatari-owned 747-8 in February when it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida, near his Mar-a-Lago resort. At the time, the White House said the president did so to get a better understanding of how the updated Air Force One planes would be configured.

In a statement, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a good government organization based in Washington, questioned whether the transfer might violate the Constitution’s ban on U.S. officials accepting gifts from foreign governments absent congressional approval.

“This sure looks like a foreign country that the president has personal business dealings in giving the president a $400 million gift right before he meets with their head of state,” the spokesman, Jordan Libowitz, said.

Trump is set to visit Qatar during a trip to the Middle East this week. The airplane will not be presented or accepted while Trump is in Qatar.

ABC reported, citing sources, that lawyers for the White House counsel’s office and the Department of Justice had prepared an analysis concluding that it would be legal and constitutional for the Defense Department to accept the plane as a gift and later transfer it to Trump’s presidential library.

There are no limits to Trump’s sleaze!

Tony

Barry Diller. Courtesy of Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

If you have any interest in Barry Diller, his life, and his role in the media, Maureen Dowd had an extended article yesterday in The New York Times that is for you.  She starts with his autobiography, Who Knew,  that was just published.  Here is an excerpt. 

“ Barry Diller has only just started his book tour, but he’s already trying to sneak away.

“I’m shortening the tour part,” the 83-year-old mogul said recently in his sonorous baritone, the “Killer Diller” voice that intimidated and intrigued Hollywood for more than half a century. “I am not up for interrogation on aspects of my personal life.”

As we sat on cappuccino-colored couches in his gorgeous Art Nouveau aerie in the Carlyle hotel, I reminded Diller about the bewitchingly candid first paragraph of his bildungsroman, Who Knew:

The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional. My parents separated often and came a day short of divorce several times before I was 10; my brother was a drug addict by age 13; and I was a sexually confused holder of secrets from the age of 11.

And there it was, Hollywood’s worst-kept secret spilled: Barry Diller is gay. Or rather, bisexual — or bi with Di, since, as he writes, “While there have been a good many men in my life from the age of 16, there has only ever been one woman.” The sultry Princess of Wrap, Diane von Furstenberg, swept him away back in the Studio 54 days. She’s proud of being the first woman he ever slept with, in a torrid romance that later unfurled into a long, happy, sexually liberated marriage.

Von Furstenberg and Diller’s friends are watching, wide-eyed, as Diller talks publicly for the first time about his unorthodox private life. The gruff, point-blank executive is known, as the Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos said, as “one of the very few who doesn’t care what people think in a town full of people who do care.” That is true in business. But for most of his lifetime, Diller did care about what people thought of his sexual orientation.

“I wanted to tell the story,” he said about his alienated childhood and dazzling career. “And I knew if I told the story, I had to tell the truth.” That doesn’t make it easier. He’s kept his private life shrouded for so long, it’s hard now to rip off that shroud.

Even though he early on created what he calls his own “Bill of Rights,” where he would not tell many people in his business world that he was gay but would also not pretend to be heterosexual and act like “one of the boys,” he now says he was just “chicken.”

“So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived,” he writes. “Consider if you can what such a daily drip of that kind of dysfunctional life does to one’s sense of self.”

In his big, sprawling life, Diller has helped shape the culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, traversing the world of entertainment from a heady time for Hollywood studios to a bleak time, deftly surfing the shifts from networks to movie theaters to cable to VCRs to streaming. He was early to see the artificial intelligence revolution coming and to predict that the upstart streamers would swallow the grand old studios — the death knell for Hollywood as we knew it.

“It’s interesting that Barry spent the first part of his career building Hollywood,” The Ankler’s Janice Min said, “and the second part talking about what a disaster it is.”

But that culture has also shaped his life. His memoir is blunt, like him, with a vulnerable story about coming of age in America that stands in stark contrast to the manosphere and the cartoonish, chest-thumping, cat-lady-hating “masculine energy,” as Mark Zuckerberg termed it, being projected in Washington by President Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.”

I found Dowd’s entire article most interesting.

Tony